Tokens
by Bruceluce
Summary: How the boy became a man.


_So I know I still haven't finished my first fanfic. This one came to me last night and it basically wrote itself. I'll go back to Aftermath one day but in the meantime I hope you enjoy that one._

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**Tokens**

She had cried when they told her it was a boy. She had dreamed of a little girl to dress in pastel colours and keep away from the violent world of men. But she had given birth to him, and had handed him to her husband, offering her son to him as a token of peace.

Both of them knew this boy wasn't his father's son. He was older than her and theirs had been a fruitless marriage for five years now. But she was pretty and he was often away, one night a friend paid a visit and a few soft words were murmured in the dark. When he came back she was pregnant and he pretended he couldn't count. So she handed her son to him, teary but full of the hope that the boy would succeed where she had failed in making her husband a happy man.

As a baby his serious face and vibrant blue eyes were framed by soft curls of golden blonde hair. She couldn't get herself to cut the downy locks but everyday her husband pestered and threatened. It was a boy and not a girl. Still she combed the boy's hair every night as she sang him words of a mother's love.

One day she left her husband alone with the baby. It had been a few minutes only, but when she re-entered the room he was cutting off the last strand of her son's baby hair. Her husband was proud and defiant as he held the boy to the mirror. She choked up a sob, afraid that if she let it out it would never end.

***

As a 5 year-old he had loved the times when his father was away. After school he would sit at the Formica kitchen table with his mother and they woud dip their still warm chocolate chip cookies in tall glasses of milk. He loved the bluish tinge of the cold milk.

In the summer afternoons she would help him haul the big Encyclopaedia under the sycamore in the garden. He marvelled at the wonderful pictures of colourful birds and learned to read deciphering names of exotic foreign places. He would sing absurd songs to his mother with the words he had learned and she would laugh.

When he went out on what he called his 'expiditions' in the field at the back of the garden she would tuck a few hard-boiled sweets in the back pocket of his denim trousers. When he came back home with a bloody knee after falling from his bike on the gravel path in front of the house she gently cleaned the cut and stroked his hair until it didn't hurt anymore and the boy went running off outside again. He would bring her tokens of boyish love in the form of a tiny daisy or an especially smooth stone.

In the evening they would have their dinner of tomato soup or cheese on toast in the candle-lit living room. She would put the radio on and hum along to Roy Orbison when she retreated to the kitchen to do the dishes. He would take a kitchen cloth in his tiny hands and dry the cookery items she handed him with a grateful smile. On cold nights she would bring him a hot water bottle and if he begged just a little she would read him a second bedtime story.

***

When his father was in there would be steak every night for dinner. The boy was revolted by the bloody lump of flesh every time and every time his father would boom and thunder that he didn't sweat himself out for his son to frown upon a good honest piece of meat. It would make him a man. The boy would cut it into tiny pieces and shovel a few of them in his mouth, going to spit them out in the garden as soon as dinner was over. One day his father found out and made him eat a whole undercooked steak. To teach him. That night the boy was sick many times but the father didn't let the anxious mother out of bed to help him. The 7 seven year-old boy spent the night throwing up, waking up in the morning shivering in sheets soiled by chewed chunks of beef and bile. His mother had cried once his father had left for work. After that the father had looked with disgust at the boy who was perfectly content eating his mashed potatoes and sweet corn.

When the father was around there was no soft drying of tears with a kiss and a tender word, no hot cocoa on winter days, no music, no candles, no laughter and not much talking either. When the father was around the boy wasn't allowed to get out of bed once he had been tucked in, even if he had forgotten to go to the bathroom before slipping under the sheets.

When the father was around there was no spending hours indoors reading or drawing and on rainy and cold days he locked the boy out of the house for two hours for the boy to go play outside so that he would grow immune to adverse conditions. He had a few severe colds and even once pneumonia but soon the boy grew to like the pitter-patter the rain made on the roof of his secret tree-house hiding place.

***

The boy loved school but had very few friends. Most children he thought were dull and he let them know so whenever they approached him. Aged 8, the boy really liked a girl with dark hair and green eyes who went by the name of Lucy. He thought it was the prettiest name ever. Sometimes him and Lucy and a boy called Will and some other kids would go on fishing outings by the lake. They were always so excited for the lake was a forbidden place. One day Will fell in and drowned.

The boy had watched Will's lifeless body resurface and wondered what had happened. He had asked his mother about lungs and breathing and how fish could live under-water but she had been too upset to answer his excited questions. He hadn't understood why his mother cried about Will's drowning and had felt ashamed of not feeling anything for the dead boy. He had asked his mother about death but she was disturbed by what she thought was morbid fascination and sent him to church for his answers. That proved disappointing and pretty soon the boy had a world of questions in his head and none but himself to rely on for boy took up reading fervently. At night once the father was in bed and he could hear him snore the boy would turn on his pocket light and devour everything he could lay his hands on from comics to newspaper articles to the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

Later the boy started collecting words. He especially liked the Latin ones: the names of plants and diseases. He would write them on sheets of rich creamy white letter paper his mother had given him once when his father was away. He pinned them on the walls of his room and loved to look at them, the way their letters tangled into one another, cherishing the way his tongue darted up and down and in and out when he read them out loud but under his breath lest his father should hear him. One day the father tore the papers off the walls and threw them in the fire. He yelled and threatened and talked about being outdoors and football and manhood but the 11 year-old boy already knew that he could like the feel of Latin words on his tongue and still be a man so he didn't listen.

***

The boy grew up fast and grew up strong. At 14 he was a very good long-distance runner and a fast swimmer. His father swore by football and baseball and so the boy voluntarily despised those sports. After collecting words he had collected facts, weird bits of information he collected from his lectures and scribbled down in a notepad that he kept under a loose tile in the storage space under the bathtub along with his other prized possessions.

Pretty soon school hadn't been able to quench his thirst for learning and so he had taught himself music and Latin. In a garage sale one day he bought an old dog-eared anatomy book and was mesmerized by the intricate and fascinating ways of the human body. For weeks he would draw nothing but very accurate representations of the heart and lungs, thinking of the long-dead Will all along. He was just as fascinated by ancient civilizations and history, and between archaeology and medicine his heart hesitated for a long time.

The humiliations his father had subjected him to as a child had soon given way to violent fights, once even escalating to the point where the teenage boy had punched the father in the face. His mother had cried and refused to talk to the boy for a week. He had hated himself for hurting her but he hated him even more. By then the boy knew the man wasn't his father. He despised him with all the arrogance of teenage hood. He ran away from home a few times, always coming home after a few days tormented by the image of his worried mother crying herself silently to sleep at night. When his father sent him away to an American military school in Italy when the boy was 16 he ran away for good, living on the streets of Naples for eight full months. He returned with a full scholarship for Johns Hopkins University. His parents never knew how he had done it.

***

In the autumn he was sent back to the USA and put in the care of his grand-mother. She was a dry and mean old woman and he spent as little time with her as possible, staying on campus during weekends and holidays. He settled upon studying hard and made a few friends. Girlfriends came and went but he had too painful a knowledge of the bitterness of married life to ever commit. He took up Lacrosse and worked in a book store. With the money he purchased a second-hand grand piano. Later he bought a beaten down motorcycle which he spent hours repairing until it ran smooth again. Little by little he happily forgot all about his torturing father and his tortured mother.

***

Such were a few tokens of his early life as he told them to Lisa Cuddy one night in their bed. She had wanted to know more about his childhood. She had listened attentively, gazing at him from her pillow as he talked looking up at the ceiling, stroking his hair tenderly. None of it really came as a surprise. She had always known House's childhood hadn't exactly been a happy one. What did surprise her was how strong an impact all those events had had on him and how vivid his memory was. Even as a child his understanding of the world around him was outstanding. The man she was now lying next to was so much like the boy of his story that she had not even the slightest difficulty picturing him as a baby with golden locks. Once he had stopped talking she remained silent for a while.

"You got more than you bargained for, heh?" he asked with a smile, squeezing her to him. He hadn't want to upset her, and he now tried to return the atmosphere to a lighter mood.

"Yeah" she admitted with a smile as she propped herself on her elbows, facing him. She looked into his eyes. He could see her own eyes were brilliant and wet.

"Jeez, Lise" he chided playfully "I'm here and well, no need to cry!". He smiled and stroked her cheek tenderly.

She gave him an almost apologetic smile. "I know, I know. I couldn't help it. You know what I'm like." She reached up and kissed his lips slowly and tenderly. "It's just...I never realised what you'd been through. I mean, I knew it'd been hard but I wasn't expecting... And yet it explains so much." Gregory House, all his weaknesses as well as his strengths, made so much more sense now.

"Thank you for telling me all this." She kissed him lightly again and let her head fell on his torso. She paused, one hand stroking the veins on his forearm, reflecting.

"In the end it's a beautiful story. How a woman loved her little boy. How a flawed father tried to raise a boy he knew wasn't his son. How that boy became a man, despite everything. And what a man!" She scooted up and kissed him again, this time with more passion.

"I love that man. I love you, Greg." she breathed in his mouth, cupping his jaw. She lay down on his torso, and his arms encircled her as their kiss deepened.

_Hope you liked it! As always ,R&R please!_


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